All the more reason to avoid the N800. Excuse me if I don't appreciate being used as a beta tester only to be alienated later on.

The 770 boat is sinking, and many of us are left onboard. If this is the way Nokia's platform is going to work, then I'd rather drown now and cut my losses than spend another $400 (and a lot more of my sweat and tears) to delay the inevitable for just a little longer.

My 770 works just fine for my purposes, anyway. It's not myself for whom I lament. I don't need the N800 or OS 2007. I feel bad for the open-source supporters among us that figured that a linux-based platform would mean a slew of 3rd-party software applications. Now those 3rd-party developers are going to move to an "upgraded" platform, potentially forgetting Maemo 2.x entirely. It's one thing to upgrade an operating system via free download, but quite another to make it dependent on a new set of expensive hardware.

I feel bad for those of us that invested in a whim and stuck with its bugginess in quiet (or in some cases not-so-quiet) expectance of fixes and maybe even the occasional enhancement. After all, no company would knowingly alienate their best customers, the early adopters, would they? Well, in this case, they have. I guess Nokia is only looking out for the early re-adopters.

The 770, for me, was an experiment in hopes to replace my Palm-based PDA. Although that experiment mostly failed, I found something novel in it that turned out to be a whole lot better than the proprietary Palm OS. The flexibility of the 770 and its linux-based operating system afforded us with options that the Palm OS could never provide. And for that I am appreciative.

I don't, however, appreciate being abandoned, and although it isn't clear yet the extent of the abandonment, I am reluctant to believe that it will be insignificant.


(Apologies for the off-topic rant. I don't mean to sound so vitriolic. I'm just trying to get over this bitter taste in my mouth.)